Well the latest outrage of the 109th Congress has been revealed, and this one's a doozy. It's called Coconut Road, and if you haven't heard of it yet, get thee over to TPM where it's just starting to come out.
It's the Alaska delegation again, this time Rep. Don Young (R) AK.
Back in 2005 there was a federal transportation bill. It was voted on, reconciled in conference and the president signed it. When it came out of conference, it contained an earmark of $10M for widening I75 in Florida. By the time the president signed the bill, that earmark had been changed to read
Coconut Rd. interchange I-75/Lee County
Coincidentally, a developer named Dan Aronoff who would benefit from this interchange work just happened to hold a fundraiser for Young right before the mysterious earmark metamorphosis.
Basically, the scam goes like this.
Bill gets voted on by House and passes, with earmarks.
Bill gets voted on by Senate and passes, with more earmarks.
Bill goes to conference committee and potentially gets even more earmarks.
Reconciled bill gets voted on [h/t Robespierrette]
Now here's where it gets interesting. After the reconciled bill is passed, it goes through a process called "bill enrollment" which is handled by the United States House Committee on House Administration. The basic theory of enrollment is literally to remove typos. From the original charter of the committee that preceded the House Administration Committee:
When bills are enrolled they shall be examined by a joint committee for that purpose, who shall carefully compare the enrollment with the engrossed bills as passed in the two Houses, and, correcting any errors that may be discovered in the enrolled bills, make their report forthwith to their respective Houses.
So enrollment is the step after reconciliation, but before the presidents signature. The purpose being, as I understand it, to change all instances of "hte" to "the".
As TPM explains it:
The 'Coconut Road' earmark wasn't in the bill passed by the House and Senate. I don't mean it wasn't in the original bills before they went to conference (where the separate bills from the House and the Senate are reconciled into a single bill). It wasn't in the final, reconciled piece of legislation passed by both houses of Congress after conference.
But it is there now.
So here's what happened. Apparently Young added the text after Congress had already passed it but before the president signed it. As Laura McGann explains in this post, this must have occurred during the process called "bill enrollment" when revisions of grammar and technical but not substantive changes are permitted to be made.
The president did sign the bill. But the portion apparently added by Young, if I understand anything about our system of government, was never passed by Congress. So it means nothing.
In the 108th Congress, of course, Bob Ney was the chair of this ill-fated committee and both he and John Doolittle were members of the committee during the 108th and 109th congresses. Interestingly, Young, as far as I can tell, was never a member of the administration committee. He was chair of the Transportation Committee from which the bill emanated.
So the question arises, how do the reports linking Young to this earmark make that connection? It has to be through the Ney or Doolittle investigations, most likely Doolittle since that's the hot one right now. If Young is the actor here, he needed the help of someone actually on the administration committee.
That's all I have right now, but it's a package, ain't it?
PS: Apologies for the rushed quality of this post. I am not the ideal person to diary this, not being a legislation wonk or an Alaska wonk, and being crunched for time, but I can see it dangling out there on TPM and can't believe it's not getting any play here.